BUSINESS
Response to “Find out what’s important to each employee.” Business, Aug. 7
The Business section contained a piece featuring advice on companies focusing on their employees and building loyalty (“‘Find out what’s important to each employee,’” Aug. 7). This is a refreshing change from the way most employees were treated during the last decade. Downsizing (often a metaphor for age discrimination) has destroyed the bonds that once existed between companies and their employees. Employees now treat employers as they were once treated. What goes around surely comes around.
Greg Berry, Marietta
BANKING
Let’s remember why community banks exist
Pat Tuley’s “Changes in banking world” (Business, Aug. 7) prodded me to offer another perspective on potential consequences associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Tuley correctly points out that additional regulatory burden comes with additional costs that all banks will need to absorb. I am concerned with the conclusion that community banks will have to become much larger, and have to merge with other institutions or take other steps to become bigger, to spread these additional compliance costs over a larger base.
My concern centers on why community banks exist. I suggest they exist because that is what a certain sector of the community wants. Clients of a community bank don’t necessarily think that bigger is better. They do business with a local community bank that is small enough to know the customer, and customize services to the needs of local businesses and consumers.
The regulators are an important constituent of all banks, but so are the customers. A well-run community bank will need to find the right balance between managing compliance costs, while remembering why they exist: to serve their community.
Terry Freeman, chief operating officer and chief financial officer, Private Bank of Buckhead
POLITICS
Love how Luckovich pecked our lawmakers
Sometimes I smile at Mike Luckovich’s cartoons, and sometimes they anger me. The one published Aug. 7 (Opinion) about Congress leaving town as part of the turkey recall made me laugh out loud. I loved it!
John Titus, Stone Mountain
Warning to Washington: We’re watching you
I would like to ask our political and business leaders: Where were you? The housing bubble and banking crisis did not happen overnight, or as a result of a single issue. Many were complicit in those situations.
The debt ceiling issue did not land on your desk at the last minute. You could see that coming a mile and months away, but where were you?
A good first step would be eliminating lobbyists, special interest groups and pork barrel spending. Let’s also start by you doing what we elected you to do — and not what your donors or buddies want.
At the next election, I will be voting. I will be voting with my wallet as well. In the meantime, I will be paying attention to where you are (or are not) — and if you have been paying attention.
Chris Rice, Rex
America may find itself in Greece’s dire situation
I hope when our two political parties quit pointing the finger at each other for being responsible for S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, they will get to work solving this mammoth crisis. If they don’t, we will find ourselves in the same shape as Greece.
It seems every time we have a problem in this country, we establish a department or agency to solve that particular problem. But once a department or agency is established, it’s there forever!
Good luck, Congress, in solving the problems you created in the first place.
Joe Orr, Alpharetta
